On the Apple Push Notification Service for iPhone OS/SDK 3.0, there’s an interesting comment thread over on Mobile Orchard. Ryan Daigle writes:
This has the potential to become a very expensive and heavy-weight hack to masquerade as a local cron system on the iPhone.
As Adrian Hosey reasons in that same thread, it really is a lot of fail-prone nonsense. There should be some kind of local device API for scheduling with launchd or whatever the OS uses.